Photography by Bob Montanaro

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Recondite Greenhouses

A rare midweek holiday – July 4th – allowed me to pay an early morning visit to the Demonstration Garden at the University of Florida’s IFAS facility outside of Ft. Pierce in a quest to find insects and other small critters for my bug program currently in production. What I remembered as a beautiful walk through native plants and their habitats from a few years ago is now an overgrown morass of invasive exotics with native plants struggling to survive. And the trail is so overgrown I was able to penetrate only about six feet into it before being forced to turn back. What a disappoint and a waste of what had been a valuable resource. Next door is a USDA agricultural research station with rows of greenhouses behind barbed wire fences.